We discovered that on the balcony we could hear each other. It was still cold and lonely. The eerie forest and blue snow went on for miles and miles. I was overtaken by the loneliness. Francois shouted at me. “What?”

“Nothing, I didn’t say anything!” I shouted back.

Again he shouts, “It’s fucking cold!”

“Yeah, I’m freaking out!” I yell.

“What?” he hollers, “Forget it,” I yelled back.

We returned to our coffins, and once again the train slowed to a halt. From there we could hear a man on his walkie talkie. Neither of us could make out what he was saying.

My comrade whispered a little too loudly, “Are we at the border?”

I told him to shush. The man stopped talking. I was sure we had been heard, but minutes passed and to our (somewhat) relief, we started to move again.

An hour later the train stopped in a small town and we got out. It had been six hours on the train. A license plate on a parked car read “Maine.” We are in Maine. Could be worse, I think to myself. The side of tin shed read “Brownsville.” We were in Brownsville, Maine!

I asked an Engineer up in his cabin if there were any trains leaving for Quebec. He smiled at us and said there would be one leaving at 7 in the morning. We asked him where we would have ended up if we had stayed on our train. Rhode Island, he said, but it wouldn’t be taking off again until 3 am. We remarked on how kind he was and I told Francois that it was because we were no longer in Quebec, where people seem to be afraid to speak to one another for fear of not speaking the same language. In the meantime the man was probably telephoning the cops.

We decided to check out Brownsville. From what we could tell, the town consisted of two stores, one gas station and at least one hundred little houses. We had been hoping for an instant teller booth to sleep in but Brownsville just wasn’t that kind of place. Walking on through the snow, we marveled at how far we had gone. A car prowled by us. We kept on walking. It drove by again. This time it slowed down to check us out, then drove on. On its third round it stopped, the window opened and a guy in a baseball cap asked us where we were from. He seemed friendly so I gave him our whole story. Peering in, we could see that the car was full of rowdy teenage boys, also wearing baseball caps.

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